I mean imagine those cheesy pop ballades from the 80s or 90s. They’re not out to impress, and they seek to express teenagy love. Is it art? 20%!
I don’t think there is a sharp line. If you ask your 5 year old daughter to draw a sunrise what she’ll come up with is art - in some sense. If you’re out in the city and look up and see a crosswalk sign that is art - in some sense. If you attend a classical concert and hear a Haydn sonata that is entertainment - in some sense.
Well I feel that entertainment is a very social thing, and art is a very personal thing.
Art is expressed and often put out there for many people to consume, but at it’s core the creative spirit was lit with a candle that burned from within to satisfy itself - not fueled nor contorted by the desire for a social reaction be it positive or negative.
I suppose any expressive writing can be art, just a different genre, as of course literature is art too.
This might have been said here already since I haven’t read all of it… But I think it’s in the purpose. Do you seek to entertain? At a piano recital you often hear at least one or two works which appears to me to have been written as entertainment, while something like a Chopin Ballade - IMO - has very little to do with entertainment but a whole lot with art. Similarly playing styles, I think Friedman was largely out to entertain when he sat down at a piano. I wouldn’t say that with Richter, or Sokolov, or Brendel, etc.
Pure entertainment is a commodity. Pure art is driven only by its creator. And whilst these pure forms are extremely unlikely to overlap, there’s a capacity for intersection elsewhere.
Incidentally, but related to the discussion - Pogorelich was very annoyed in the 1980s when he found out his concerts were filed as “entertainment” by a city, and continued with quite a rant about how what he was doing was hard work both for him and the audience and definitely not “entertainment”.
Well hang on X - I think it depends on the cheesy pop ballad in question.
What’s fascinating is that one cheesy pop ballad could have been an absolutely genuine outpouring of feeling, but a flop with connecting to audiences.
Another cheesy pop ballad could have been contrived and manufactured, passionlessly, just to sell records - yet it connects with audiences.
So which one is art and which is entertainment? Because the one that has most emotive impact on most people is the latter - but it was conceived of a jackal! from the fiery pits of maufactured pop hell
But the other was so sincere, sadly impacted no one the way it did it’s author.
So for you a blog post is art, since it intends to express something? Isn’t any writing thus art by your definition?
This is really a post Mozartian, and maybe even Lisztian view of art, at least when applied to music. Bach was usually composing for practical reasons, for example. I’d wager that the social reaction was very important to him, because if his patron didn’t like his work he’d be out of a job.
With the Bach example, you’re talking about art which was created for a specific functional purpose. In this case, the creator is sufficiently skilled to create something which retains artistic value despite having been written for a reason which isn’t artistically pure.
Well yeah when we talk about people who compose for the purpose of pleasing an audience - they are in the grey area that my idealistic definitions partially fall flat with
It can be a perfect coincidence though that Bach was creating thoroughly sincere art even when he intended to entertain.
He wasn’t a stifled musician - he would create things like art of fugue perhaps almost solely for his own artistic expression, but his expressive inclinations could also clearly lend themselves to a happy coincidence of being popularly appealing and also genuine expression form him.
Take stuff like his Italian Concerto - it’s not that complex, but he was being sincere in writing it, as he was a huge fan of Vivaldi - the tuneful Italian master.
Liszt is a pertinent composer to mention at this point, since he composed vast amounts of material primarily to elicit a public reaction. He was very good at this (let’s not forget that it’s been a posthumous handicap to his reputation)… and he also wrote a lot of music which clearly came truly from within.
Well let’s take a different route with this and cross over into the idea of ‘selling out’ - something that’s often been said of certain rock/metal bands.
Take Metallica’s Black album.
Were their prior albums Art and then all of a sudden that album was Entertainment just because it was so streamlined, simplified, and crossed over to a huuuuge mainstream audience?
I’d argue that it was still Art and that their musical expressive inclinations at that point happened to happily coincide with a sound that could cross over and appeal to huge amounts of people.
I think they knew that would happen, and I think it was partly calculated. But I think it was ALSO artistically sincere…it’s a fucking awesome album, on it’s own terms.
Yeah but there’s no rule saying art music must be acoustic. Whoever wrote those cheesy pop ballades were out to express and portray a disco kind of love, and there would have been a creative and artistic process to come up with a zong which did that. The result was entirely banal if you put it next to Art of the Fugue or the Prok-8, but it’s nonetheless art - to some degree.
You can make the same case for just about any type of music really, even things like Michael Jackson where it’s mostly about beats etc and no direct narrative or particular feeling (sometimes) is sought. Even if you’re not solving a particular artistic problem it’s still an artistic process which led to it.
My best universal resolution really is that they’re not entirely separable, and which fits best is in what it seeks to do. Liszt’s La Notte is a really crappy form of entertainment and Madonna’s Like A Virgin is a really crappy form of art, but most zongs & workz fit somewhere in the middle.
Well Festin, I can see why it would seem this way with some of his ‘shallower’ works but I think this was genuinely part of his ‘artistic taste’ - as he was a many of many sides, including music without huge emotional depth.
I think the only frustration was for him that audiences preferred the shallow stuff over his deeper outpourings, which I’m sure wasn’t his ideal situation.
He quite obviously understood the effect things like the Grand Galop had. And yes, it’s musically somewhat trivial, but he was also putting his competitors in their place at the same time as cementing his popular reputation. One of the great things about Liszt is that when he writes disposable stuff he does it with such explosive panache.
(Comparative footnote - Jesus Christ, has anyone ever looked at paraphrases by the likes of Sydney Smith? Omg.)
from the fiery pits of maufactured pop hell
